Category: art

Room for/Souvenir

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Locust Projects presents Locust Projects presents Room for the living/ Room for the dead, a new site-specific commissioned project by Miami-based artist T. Eliott Mansa.

The immersive and interactive installation merges the concept of Florida / Family rooms as a home’s casual, social hub for gathering, entertainment and play, with that of less-used living rooms that served as shrines for treasured family photos and heirlooms. Inspired/influenced by the artist’s friend and writer Noelle Barnes’ living room and the artist’s own memories of sunken living rooms of the 1970s, the artist considers the cultural phenomena of the living room as unlived, unoccupied, untouched spaces that children and guests were prohibited from using.

T. Eliott Mansa: Room for the living/Room for the dead 2022, installation view at Locust Projects. Photography by Zachary Balber.

Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition, Mementos, at the Renaissance Society in 1998, is a requiem to the 60s, a decade synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement.

Conceived as an installation for the Renaissance Society, it features three new paintings, two sculptural components, a video projection and is replete with an angelic pantheon of African-American cultural and political figures who died between 1959 and 1979. Marshall uses the genre of history painting to reread the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the whole of African-American History in relation to a very complex present.

This exhibition traveled to Brooklyn Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Fine Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Santa Monica Museum; and Boise At Museum.

Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir I, 1997, acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 9 x 13 feet, Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund.

Marshall modeled the settings of the Souvenir series after black middle class living rooms that have the shrine-like quality of Depression-proof interiors, as static and eternal as a plastic plant in a plastic pot. They are rooms where loved ones captured in the first generation of color photography yellow to the tick of a too accurate clock. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place, including the gaudy yet priceless souvenir cherished as a reminder of people and places that make up a life. It is where memorabilia from the births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals of a hundred distant relatives are preserved. For African Americans, all of whose lives were in some way affected by the struggle for equality, it is impossible to think of a room made claustrophobic with memories that does not double as a shrine to saints Kennedy and King.

Hamza Walker, To Fulfill these Rights
Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir II, 1997, Acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 9 x 13 feet, Courtesy of Addison Gallery of Art, purchased as a gift of the Addison Advisory Council in honor of John (Jock) M. Reynold’s directorship, 1989-1998.
Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir III, 1998, Acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 9 x 13 feet, Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998, Acrylic with glitter on unstretched canvas, 9 x 13 feet, Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.

A loss/entry/return

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Recently auctioned, a work from the series Untitled (loss/entry/return) #00005, 2005, Xerox [solvent] transfer, ink and graphite on watercolor paper; and an exhibition at Frederic Snitzer Gallery.

Loss/ Entry/ Return offers works based on a journey of perception. Drawings, photos, sculpture and sound are the tangible manifestations of moments along the way. What we experience is the process of voyaging from indeterminacy to clarity, from vastness to specific identity. Ideas of guidance and presence are constant throughout the works.

From an email sent to the gallery for the press release.

With “loss/entry/return” Guerrier shifts ground. You see the artist looking through binoculars at the expanse of the metropolis. But it’s not a real city. This is more like a superimposition of events, black blotches and green tempera splashes (with directional tentacles) moving near the background of the metropolis’s silhouette. Amid these images you find linear sentence fragments, silent remarks as if coming from a lost century of ideologies.

Then one discovers this conspicuous cantilevered solid structure — a sort of corbel — that the artist draws in most of his pieces. I read a bit into it: In architecture, cantilevers separate themselves from the ground; they are singular, impulsive. What’s more important, they don’t subjugate the territory.

Guerrier is slowly moving away from the dense existential “feel” of reality expressed in his earlier photos. He has become a more gregarious, unconventional observer, exploring his own situation in relation to the rest of us. Now he should incorporate into his photography some of the new elements present in this series.

At the exhibit, an important local curator helped me see a bit of French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord in Guerrier’s work. Suddenly the seemingly disconnected one-liners inside the drawings made more sense.

In his 1967 Society of the Spectacle,Debord warned that our lives had become transactional relationships. Spectacle was a key concept for Debord, who borrowed from Marx’s idea of alienation. We become alienated from ourselves when everything we do, we do for the sake of abundance. The spectacle then becomes the sad and endless race to own more, which, paradoxically, turns into an abundance of dispossession. Some of this message is already present in Guerrier’s promising cityscapes.

Alfredo Triff, City Views and Latin News, Miami New Times, April 21, 2005.

Listening closely

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Tina Campt on episode 8 of ICA Miami’s podcast; begins at 22:54. Listening as an act of attunement. Listening for quiet (not an absence/subtle presence) affective registers within an image, a work, an installation, a practice.

“Attend to that which is not always directly confronting us”

T. Eliott Mansa project, Room for the living/ Room for the dead, at Locust Projects, would reward close listening.

Photography by Zachary Balber.

The installation merges the concept of Florida / Family rooms as a home’s casual, social hub for gathering, entertainment and play, with that of less-used living rooms that served as shrines for treasured family photos and heirlooms. Inspired/influenced by the artist’s friend and writer Noelle Barnes’ living room and the artist’s own memories of sunken living rooms of the 1970s, the artist considers the cultural phenomena of the living room as unlived, unoccupied, untouched spaces that children and guests were prohibited from using.

As an alternative, many people used ‘Florida/Family rooms’ to entertain company and watch television. Meanwhile, in the ‘unlived’ living rooms, many elders wrapped the furniture in protective plastic. For Mansa, these living rooms were treated as shrines–a space honoring one’s ancestors and those who have traveled beyond this plane. With this installation, the artist seeks to collapse the dichotomy between the ‘Living Room’ as shrine, and the ‘Florida/Family room’ in a way that creates ‘a room for the living’ as much as ‘a room for the dead’.

Chris Friday’s Good Times, curated by Laura Novoa, promises to engage quietly expressed modalities within the bold depicted.

[The works] prompt the viewer to consider more expansive notions of blackness and where communities – known and unknown – are given a space to dialogue, reflect, and celebrate.

Friday’s subjects – family, friends, colleagues – and the settings in which they exist, become mechanisms to unsettle traditional hierarchies and arrangements of power. In particular, she presents large-scale drawings of figures in acts of leisure – playing, dancing, resting – that refuse full exposure in a slight but noticeable turning away from the viewer. By placing them in the public realm (i.e. the gallery space), but limiting access to their interiority, Friday’s works inhabit a liminal space that is at once visible and hidden, silent and defiant.